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The stubbornly low number of female computer-science students in the United States has generated
a pile of academic studies, ample hand-wringing and a wide-ranging discussion in tech and education
circles about what can be done to boost the number of women choosing computing careers.

All of which raises a fair question: What difference does it make if women don’t join the tech
workforce in the same numbers that men do?

It turns out it makes a huge difference. The dearth of women in computing has the potential to
slow the U.S. economy, which needs more students in the pipeline to feed its need for more
programmers. It harms women by excluding them from some of the best jobs in the country. And it
damages U.S. companies, which studies show would benefit from more diverse teams.

Quite a trifecta.

“Today, 2.5 billion people are connected to the Internet,” said David Culler, chairman of the
University of California-Berkeley’s Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences department. “There
are more cellphone users than toothbrush users. You look at how intrinsic information technology is
to all aspects of society and all aspects of modern life. Would you want any demographic group to
be left out of shaping something that is so important to our future?”

The damage starts with a problem that is already being confronted by the tech industry and other
companies that rely on computing talent (which means practically all of them): The economy is
creating far more computing jobs than U.S. schools are creating computer-science graduates.

True, not all computer scientists work in computing jobs, and not all computing jobs are filled
by computer scientists, but the mismatch illustrates the potential problem.

Based on current trends, U.S. universities will produce about 400,000 computer scientists
between 2010 and 2020, a decade during which 1.4 million U.S. computing jobs will open, leaving a
gap of about 1 million computing jobs. Together, those 1 million jobs would pay $500 billion in
wages, according to Hadi Partovi, co-founder of Code.org, a nonprofit group working to encourage
computer-science education in K-12 schools.

Without U.S. workers to fill those jobs, employers will face three choices: export the work,
import the workers or leave the positions empty.

But where some see a problem, people such as Jocelyn Goldfein see a historic opportunity.

Given that women make up not even one-fifth of computer-science graduates, she figures, why not
turn to the great untapped bench to pick up the slack, the way women did by moving into factory
jobs during World War II? Why not begin to encourage women to pursue lucrative and plentiful jobs
as programmers, systems analysts, information-systems managers and the like?

“I really think this is kind of a Rosie the Riveter moment,” said Goldfein, a director of
engineering at Facebook.

The shortage is already evident in Silicon Valley, where companies such as Facebook, Google and
Apple provide big pay and perks to stock their companies with top software-engineering talent.

Kimber Lockhart, a senior director of engineering at cloud storage and collaboration company
Box, said she spends most of her time working to recruit talent and to hang on to the talent the
company has.

“It’s extremely hard to hire well-qualified engineers,” she said. “And if we could get anybody
else in the pipeline, that could make it easier. If that’s women, great.”

Encouraging women to fill those unfilled jobs would have the added benefit of righting a wrong
that has persisted for decades. When women are excluded, even unintentionally, from the computing
field, they miss out on lucrative tech careers.